The Passionate Attachment

Maidhc Ó Cathail
The Passionate Attachment
December 27, 2013

Not many tears were shed when The Rt Hon. Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, PC, FRS — or Maggie Thatcher, as she is irreverently remembered by the Irish and numerous other aggrieved parties in Britain and beyond — passed away this April. But how many of Mrs. Thatcher’s many haters around the world are aware of “the shadowy ‘advisory’ role played throughout her premiership” by the nephew and heir of the man to whom the Zionist-drafted, deliberately conflict-catalyzing Balfour Declaration was addressed?

In an important April 16 Russia Today op-ed piece, British investigative radio journalist Tony Gosling finally broached the media taboo against identifying the Iron Lady’s influential behind-the-scenes pro-Israel “advisor” dubbed “the man in the shadows”:

The taboo not a single commentator has broached though is the shadowy ‘advisory’ role played throughout her premiership by European banking fraternity’s Labour peer Lord Victor Rothschild. He was revealed in the book the Thatcher government tried to suppress, Peter Wright’s Spycatcher, to be behind London’s top secret service appointments. In 1986 Rothschild penned ‘Paying for Local Government’ the policy paper that led to the notorious Poll Tax that fell hardest on the poorest, and which brought Britons onto the streets of London in their hundreds of thousands in 1990, riots echoing London’s Poll Tax revolt of 1381.

And according to the then BBC Chairman Marmaduke Hussey, Lord Victor also initiated the sacking in 1987 of the last independent-minded Director General of the BBC, a castration from which the corporation never quite recovered.

One word captures the essence of the Thatcher legacy; ‘privatisation‘. As an exasperated former Tory Prime Minster Harold Macmillan put it “she’s selling off the family silver!”. And so tens of mind-boggling billions of pounds of silver were auctioned off to the highest bidders, mostly to Rothschild’s kith and kin. From shipyards and public housing to telephones, steel, oil, gas and water, anyone in the world was free to own the infrastructure and manufacturing heart of Britain that was once collectively ‘ours’. [emphasis added]

So, the next time you hear someone bemoan the consequences of “Thatcherism,” just tell them that the predictably oligarch-benefiting ideology should more accurately be called “Rothschildism.” Or if, like me, you’re in Japan, you could explain that the much-touted “Abenomics” — a deferential reference to Thatcherism’s “Chicago model” -based American counterpart “Reaganomics” — is simply the latest disastrous reincarnation of “Zionomics.”

Maidhc Ó Cathail is an investigative journalist and Middle East analyst. He is also the creator and editor of The Passionate Attachment blog, which focuses primarily on the U.S.-Israeli relationship. You can follow him on and Twitter @O_Cathail.

Press TV
December 21, 2013

A political analyst says the American people are “waking up to” the true nature of their country’s so-called “special relationship” with Israel.

US Secretary of State John Kerry and other senior US officials have warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against announcing new illegal settlement construction on occupied Palestinian territories.

In a phone interview with Press TV on Thursday, Maidhc Ó Cathail, an editor at The Passionate Attachment, said he believes America’s changed attitude towards Israel “is nothing theatrical” because “America or at least certain people in America are finally waking up to the real nature of” Washington’s so-called “special relationship with Israel.”

“A lot of people may have the feeling that America’s change of attitude toward Israel is purely theatrics, but I think that’s a mistake,” he opined.

Americans are beginning to realize “that Israel is not and has never been a strategic asset of America [and] that it has always been a liability,” Ó Cathail added.

“There is nothing theatrical about Israel’s anger toward Obama and Kerry,” he stated. “You only have to look at the Israeli press to see how they feel about Obama and Kerry, there was an article the other day by a leading Zionist Seth Lipsky in Haaretz in which he accused Obama and Kerry of ‘betrayal of never again.’”

Israelis’ anger with the Obama administration intensified following an interim deal between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — the US, Britain, Russia, France and China — plus Germany in Geneva on November 24.

The interim deal over Iran’s nuclear energy program was welcomed by the international community.

However, the hawkish Israeli prime minister described the nuclear deal as a “historic mistake.”

Since even before the deal was inked in Geneva, Israelis have been lobbying on Capitol Hill, hoping to get US lawmakers to pass new anti-Iran sanctions legislation.

On Thursday, US Senators Bob Menendez (D-New Jersey) and Mark Kirk (R-Illinois) introduced a new anti-Iran sanctions bill.

However, President Obama was quick to condemn the new anti-Iran effort by some hawkish senators and his Press Secretary Jay Carney said Obama would veto the bill if it ever passed Congress.

Moreover, ten US Senate committee chairs warned against the new anti-Iran bill, saying they “are strongly opposed” to it.

The phone interview can be heard here.

Maidhc Ó Cathail
The Passionate Attachment
December 17, 2013

Iran’s state-funded Press TV has just conducted an excellent interview with former American intelligence linguist Scott Rickard, in which he puts the self-destructive anti-Iran sanctions in their proper pro-Israel context, outlines John McCain’s intimate ties to the Jewish Zionist mafia, and points out the 19th century Zionist-sponsored subversion of evangelical Protestantism through the Scofield Reference Bible. But for whatever reason, whoever wrote the Press TV report’s title — “Iran suffers for its liberty from US control: S. Rickard” — misrepresented Rickard’s searing exposé of the Israel Lobby’s occupation of U.S. policy. Given that this is certainly not the first time that this sort of diversion has happened, one has to wonder if someone in Press TV is covering for Israel.

Maidhc Ó Cathail is an investigative journalist and Middle East analyst. He is also the creator and editor of The Passionate Attachment blog, which focuses primarily on the U.S.-Israeli relationship. You can follow him on and Twitter @O_Cathail.

Maidhc Ó Cathail
The Passionate Attachment
December 14, 2013

In an analysis piece entitled “Israel’s New Strategic Position,” Stratfor’s George Friedman claims that Tel Aviv has already lost its stranglehold over the U.S. political system. While Friedman doesn’t refer directly to the Israel Lobby, he provides a rare, albeit indirect, admission from an Israel partisan that Mearsheimer and Walt’s thesis was not only on the mark but may have actually understated the extent of Israeli influence over U.S. foreign policy:

The Israelis used to be able to depend on massive wellsprings of support in the U.S. public and Congress. In recent years, this support has become less passionate though it has not dried up completely. What Israel has lost is twofold. First, it has lost control of America’s regional strategy. Second, it has lost control of America’s political process. Netanyahu hates the U.S.-Iran talks not because of nuclear weapons but because of the strategic shift of the United States. But his response must remain measured because Israel has less influence in the United States than it once did.

If the founder and chairman of the global intelligence firm is more accurate about the waning of America’s “passionate attachment” to Israel than he is about Iran’s alleged threat to “wipe Israel off the map” with its most likely non-existent nuclear weapons program, I may soon have to consider renaming this blog.

Maidhc Ó Cathail is an investigative journalist and Middle East analyst. He is also the creator and editor of The Passionate Attachment blog, which focuses primarily on the U.S.-Israeli relationship. You can follow him on and Twitter @O_Cathail.

Maidhc Ó Cathail
The Passionate Attachment
December 12, 2013

If Seymour Hersh’s “major new article” on the Ghouta chemical weapons attack had acknowledged Israeli intelligence’s “central role in enabling the US’s adamant conviction that Assad’s regime fired chemical weapons at civilians” (Times of Israel, 27/8/2013) instead of asserting that the Obama administration (i.e. American imperialism) “cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad,” it’s highly unlikely that the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist would have been given 30 minutes to lay out his case by Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! — the “progressive” news program that has been dubbed Damage Control Now! due to its covering for Israel and its American-based lobby.

Maidhc Ó Cathail is an investigative journalist and Middle East analyst. He is also the creator and editor of The Passionate Attachment blog, which focuses primarily on the U.S.-Israeli relationship. You can follow him on and Twitter @O_Cathail.

Jeffrey Blankfort
The Passionate Attachment
December 6, 2013

Since the minute after midnight on the morning of January 24, [1995] unbeknownst to all but a handful of its citizens, the United States has been under a state of “national emergency.” Earlier the previous day, President Clinton had signed an executive order stating that “grave acts of violence committed by foreign terrorists that disrupt the peace process constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy and economy of the United States…”

He then declared “a national emergency to deal with that threat.” The stated intention was to block assets of what the government determines to be “terrorist” organizations in the United States “that threaten to disrupt the Middle East “peace process.”

Clinton based his action on the Emergency Economic Powers Act which President Carter had invoked against Iran in 1979 after US diplomats had been taken hostage in Tehran.

While the media coverage stressed that the order was intended to control “Islamic extremists,” it included the secular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Both groups have been part of the PLO, but have been critical of the Oslo and Cairo Agreements and the Declaration of Principles.

PLO Chief and Palestinian Authority head, Yasser Arafat, who had hailed the president as “a friend of the Palestinians” in Washington in September 1993, praised Clinton’s decision, saying he has waited for this for a long time, “because, as you know, they are using this money and this cover in different ways” (Jerusalem Times, 1/26). The article did not mention if Arafat had defined who he meant by “they.”

Two Jewish groups that were included, Kach and Kahane Chai — no doubt, so the administration could not be accused of favoritism — reportedly received an early warning of the crackdown, and were able to move their funds to safety.

Perhaps, it was an oversight, or maybe it was simply too embarrassing to declare a “national emergency” for something that was happening in Israel, but the official statement by the White House Press Secretary didn’t mention that fact, and so it went unreported in the mainstream media.

The Executive Order was quickly followed up by a new package of legislation, introduced in the House (HR 896) on Feb. 10 by Israel devotee, NY’s Charles Schumer, and in the Senate the same day by Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), a long-time lackey for the pro-Israel Lobby.

Labeled “The Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995” and ostensibly intended to impose new controls over “terrorist fundraising,” the bill is expected to have a devastating effect on the contributions from Muslim charities within the US that currently provide vital funding to for food programs, schools and hospitals in Gaza and the West Bank.

The legislation would also create further inroads into the US Constitutional guarantees by setting up a special court composed of five District Judges that would hear secret evidence not heard in open court, which could be used in criminal proceedings against “aliens” suspected of terrorism.

The bill will also permit law-enforcement agencies to conduct domestic surveillance of suspected terrorists, which runs counter to the guidelines that prohibited domestic spying that were established in the wake of massive government abuses on the late 1960’s and ‘70’s. “Since the measures can be seen as trampling on constitutional safeguards,” writes the Jewish weekly Forward’s Lucette Lagnado, “the legislation is being crafted in anticipation of objections from civil liberties’ advocates and mainstream Islamic groups who fear it will be open season on Muslims in America.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Maidhc Ó Cathail
The Passionate Attachment
December 3, 2013

Does anyone else think it’s a little too much of a coincidence that James Douglass’s “masterful” book on the JFK assassination — promoted by at least one “progressive” Zionist media outlet — which omits any reference to President Kennedy’s behind-the-scenes war with Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion over Tel Aviv’s undeclared nuclear weapons program was reprinted by Simon & Schuster, a division of CBS Corporation, whose president and chief executive is Leslie Moonves, who just happens to be a great-nephew of David Ben-Gurion?

Maidhc Ó Cathail is an investigative journalist and Middle East analyst. He is also the creator and editor of The Passionate Attachment blog, which focuses primarily on the U.S.-Israeli relationship. You can follow him on and Twitter @O_Cathail.